Trip to Kyushu

Yahara-san and team APBON samples 2011-2015 (figure: T. Yahara 2015)

It is my pleasure to be visiting Prof. Yahara and members of his lab at U. Kyushu during Oct. 2017.

I have long been in awe of the work they have done sampling forests in SE Asia since 2011, having myself only sampled five locations in the time it has taken them to do ~35! They have made over 30,000 collections, of over 21,500 taxa. See their SE Asia tree guides, and other publications. This presentation by Prof. Yahara in 2015 gives an overview of their excellent work.

Prof. Yahara has kindly invited me to visit his lab. I will also be giving a series of lectures to students in the biology department, and some seminar talks. A key reason to visit Prof. Yahara’s lab is to discuss methods to share the project’s data. See here for a post on using iNaturalist for such a purpose.

Notes on Japan

Tech

After some extended fiddling, I managed to configure netctl (my preferred Linux network connection application) for U. Kyushu’s ‘kitenet’ campus wifi. In case it is useful for others, here is my config file.
This is an important Google Translate hack: To translate images of foreign text, without the Google Translate Android app, do this:
- Clean up the image, crop it, and adjust contrast/threshold for maximum text clarity.
- Create a PDF of the image. E.g., convert img.jpg img.pdf
- Upload the PDF to Google Drive
- Open the PDF in GoogleDoc
- Google will have OCR’d the image, even non-Roman scripts (e.g., Japanese)
- Cut and paste the text into Google Translate. Da-dah! (I found this suggestion on the web somewhere, but can’t locate the post. Thanks to whoever it was.)

Imajuku

The town where I’m staying - near(-ish) to the Ito campus (30 min cycle ride, 60 min walk, 40 min (walk)-train-shuttlebus). I love this place! I had booked an AirBnB apartment overlooking the bay, and am so glad I did. It’s great. Many thanks to Koutaro-san for being such a friendly and helpful host. I’d come and live here for a month or more in a flash! Highlights of Imajuku:

Swimming in the bay. Chilly but not cold. Fairly clear water. And constantly jumping silvery fish - there must be a lot of bait fish in the bay. And herons in the dark.
Hippo bakery. Creative (aka Japanese-style) bread creations, but made from solid semi-whole-wheat flour. And what looked like awesome traditional baguettes. And the best coffee so far in Japan (ask for the ‘bitter’ choice of beans).
Makino Udon. The nearest food place to where I am staying and delicious. The (free) appetizer plate is still a mystery: perhaps it is i) pickled slivers of onion in molasses soy sauce, and ii) fried sesame seed and grated coconut, also in a sweet soy sauce.
Temple
Chinese restaurant, ...

Food

Of course, Japan is a food-lover’s paradise. Some highlights:

Yuzukosho (柚子胡椒), a local Kyushu condiment. Fermented green chilis and citrus peel. Not very ‘hot’ but adds a unique ‘zing’ to anything you put it on.
Kombinis. Yes, like many people, I am delighted by the quality (and range) of food at convenience stores. Some highlights:
- Barley, soybean and seaweed onigiri, at Lawsons.
- Simple hot coffee at Lawsons (from some kind of Italian auto-espresso machine). Excellent, and only ¥100.
- Curry steam buns from 7-Eleven. (The yellow ones, but not the ‘pizza’ steam buns, which are a different shaede of yellow).
- Strange and delicious green-tea moshi from 7-Eleven: a sweet green-tea filling inside cream (?), wrapped in very soft moshi dough, and powdered with green-tea.
Izakayas. Wow! What fun. Thanks to Mr Mung (previously a longshoreman from Kobe) for initiating me into the pleasures of shochu (imo, kome), iseng-yaki and oden. Visit him here (behind the red curtains!).

[ home | blog ]